David F. Wells is professor of historical and systematic
theology at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, South Hamilton, Massachusetts.
An ordained Congregational minister, he received his Ph. D. from the University
of Manchester. Among his publications are: The Person of Christ: A Biblical
and Historical Analysis of the Incarnation (Marshall Theological Library:
Marshall, Morgan and Scott; Crossway, 1984); co-editor and part author
with Mark Nofl, Nathan Hatch, George Marsden, and John Woodbridge, Eerdmans
Handbook to Christianity in America, (Eerdmans, 1983); The Prophetic
Theology of George Tyrrell (American Academy of Religion Studies in
Religion, Vol. 22, Scholars Press, 1982); The Search for Salvation (InterVarsity
Press, 1978); co-editor with Clark Pinnock, Toward a Theology for the
Future (Creation House, 1977); co-editor with John D. Woodbridge, The
Evangelicals: What They Believe, Who They Are, How They Are Changing (Abingdon,1975);
Revolution in Rome (InterVarsity Press, 1972). The following is
Chapter Ten in Robert K. Johnston (ed.) The Use of the Bible in Theology:
Evangelical Options (John Knox 1985.)

Two preachers articulate contrasting views of authority in a well-known
woodcut from the sixteenth century. The Roman Catholic is arrogantly wagging
his finger at the congregation and saying, "Sic dicit Papa."
The Protestant, his finger humbly pointed at the page of Scripture,
declares, "Haec dicit dominus de." The artist, needless
to say, was Protestant!

Like so many other slogans, however, the Protestant Reformers'
sola scriptura both revealed and concealed important issues. What
it revealed was their conviction that Christian theology in its form and
substance as well as its function in the church must be determined by God's
authoritative Word, the written Scriptures. Given the sufficiency of Scripture,
"whatsoever is not read therein," declares Article VI of the
Thirty-nine Articles, "nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required
of any man, that it should be believed as an article of faith, or be thought
requisite or necessary to salvation."(1) What the slogan concealed
was the complexity of the process involved in understanding God's Word
in the context of cultures far removed in time and psychological texture
from those in which the revelation was originally given. It is this complexity
which I wish to analyze in order that I may say how it is that evangelical
theologians today ought to construe the significance of the sola scriptura
principle for their work.

The Nature of Evangelical Theology

The nature of evangelical theology is determined for it by the
nature of that Word of which it is the exposition and application. The
Word of God is the unique, written disclosure of God's character, will,
acts, and plans. It is given so that men and women who have come to faith
through its teaching might learn to five in God's world on his terms, loving
and honoring him in all that they do and seeking to make known to the world
his law and gospel. That is the purpose of God's revelation and the task
of theology is to facilitate this.

This facilitation begins with the recognition of the bipolar nature
of biblical revelation. Biblical revelation was given in a particular cultural
context but it is also intended to be heard in our own context. This revelatory
trajectory, then, has a point of origination and a point of arrival. It
is the fact of inspiration and the contemporary work of the Spirit which
secure a consistency between its terminus a quo and its terminus
a quem. The work of the Holy Spirit was such that the responsible human
agents who were used in the writing of Scripture were able to employ cultural
materials and, indeed, to shape the revelation in terms of their own understanding,
but what God the Spirit willed should be revealed was exactly what was
written, and the content and intent of this revelation were alike transcultural.
The biblical revelation, because of its inspired nature, can therefore
be captive neither to the culture in which it arose nor to the culture
in which it arrives. It was not distorted as it was given, nor need it
be distorted as we seek to understand it many centuries later in contexts
far removed from those in which it was originally given.

The bipolar character of revelation is what Krister Stendahl appears
to have had in mind in the distinction he has drawn between what Scripture
"means" and what it "meant.(2) Unfortunately, however, this
is a distinction which can be understood. Much modem theology is of the
opinion that contemporary meaning is largely uncontrolled by and different
from biblical meaning. What Scripture says, it is argued, is to be determined
by the cultures in which it was given and what it means is to determined
by, and not merely related to, our own modem culture. This approach destroys
any meaningful understanding of the Spirit's work in inspiration and Muniination.

It is the task of theology, then, to discover what God has said in and
through Scripture and to clothe that in a conceptuality which is native
to our own age. Scripture, at its terminus a quo, needs to be de-contextualized
in order to grasp its transcultural content, and it needs to be re-contextualized
in order that its content may be meshed with the cognitive assumptions
and social patterns of our own time. This process, I suggest, is helpfully
illustrated by the way in which our electronic media work. Prior to the
electronic age there were only three factors involved in communication:
the orator; the speech; and the audience. With the new media the orator
has become the sending source and the audience is the receptor. The speech
has become a message which now also has to be encoded by the sending source
and decoded by the receptor. In all, then, there are now five components
in the process. With a little adaptation this model might graphically represent
the theological task(3) in this way

It is now my purpose to examine this process, focusing principally
on the two poles or foci in the theological task. This I wish to
do by redefining, for the purposes of this essay, my use of two words:
doctrine and theology.(4)

Doctrine and the Pole of Revelation

Doctrine is what the Bible says on any subject. We speak of "the
doctrine of the atonement," "the doctrine of Christ," or
"the doctrine of God," and what we have in mind is the collective
testimony from the various biblical authors as to what should be believed
about the atonement, about Christ, and about God. The word doctrine
is therefore being used in a way that is flexible enough to accommodate
the variety of biblical teaching on these and other subjects as well as
the factor of development in some themes as we move from the Old Testament
into the New Testament. Our doctrinal categories can be neither artificial,
so as toimpose an order on the biblical revelation which is not
itself a part of the revelation, nor wooden, so as to exclude testimony
which does not fall within the prescribed pattern. The doctrinal form must
arise from and faithfully represent the revelatory content which the doctrine
is seeking to present. This question, of how doctrine should be derived,
now needs to be addressed more specifically, first positively and then
negatively.

Principles of Construction

The process of deriving doctrine has three facets to it. These
facets are not so much stages, distinguished from one another in a chronological
sequence, as they are characteristics of a single process and as such always
function together with each other in any healthy formulation. These facets
or characteristics may be designated as the scientific, artistic, and sacral.(5)

The use of the word scientific in this context is undoubtedly
provocative. It may conjure up memories of an earlier phase in American
evangelical theology in which theology was customarily spoken of as being
a science or a still earlier phase in which theology used to be described
as the "queen of the sciences." Nothing so triumphalistic is
in mind here! There is, however, an analogy between the two activities
which is helpful to observe.

In both cases there is objective data which needs to be understood,
organized, and explained. The explanation with the greatest plausibility
is the one which best explains the most data. Whether one is dealing with
scientific hypotheses and theories in the one case or doctrines in the
other, the explanation must always remain subservient to and open to correction
by the data being explained. Scientific theories cannot be sustained in
cavalier disregard for the facts and neither can doctrines. Both the foundation
and the parameters of any doctrinal formulation must be provided by careful,
honest, skillful exegesis. Doctrine which is not at its heart exegetical
is not at its heart evangelical; doctrine which develops a life of its
own and blithely disregards what Scripture says is also blithely disregarding
what God says. That is what it means to have an inspired Scripture and
this is the import of the sola scriptura principle for doctrine.

It is a myth, however, to suppose that this process, either in science
or in biblical study, proceeds merely according to external laws without
reference to the inner fife of the interpreter! It is for this reason that,
in addition to the scientific dimension, mention is here made of the artistic
and sacral.

By the word artistic, what is in mind is the place of understanding
and even of self-understanding in the construction of doctrine. For, in
the nature of the case, the fruit of exegesis has to be constructed into
a synthetic whole and that construction is significantly affected by the
pre-understanding, the presuppositions, the experience, and the psychology
of the interpreter. The ideal we need to hold out to ourselves, then, is
that of faithful resonance between the realities being spoken of in Scripture
and our own understanding of those realities. An interpreter whose grasp
of the life and meaning of sin is shallow will, for example, almost inevitably
understand the teaching of Scripture on sin in a shallow manner and the
doctrinal structure which results will be correspondingly deformed. The
interpreter's cognitive presuppositions and his or her spiritual capacity
for understanding the truth of God are fundamental in the formation of
doctrine.

This, however, leads naturally into the third factor, the sacral. Martin
Luther declared that he had learned from Psalm 119that the three
factors indispensable to the construction of "right theology"
are oratio, meditatio, and tentatio. What he meant was that our
entire doctrinal endeavor must be understood in the context of knowing
God, as an exercise in spirituality, as an expression of our love and worship
of God. This is an aspect of the theological task, I dare say, which has
largely vanished from most learned discussions.

Meditatio,(7) if I may begin here, is the reading, studying,
contemplation, and inner digestion of Holy Scripture. It is the absorption
of its teaching so that its truth is infused in our lives and its teaching
becomes the means of our holding communion with God, receiving his promises
and expressing our gratitude by obeying his commands.

Reflection or meditatio does not naturally recommend itself to
us; as a matter of fact, since most of us are energetic "doers"
and high pragmatists, reflection seems like a most unproductive pastime.
The only kind of thinking we are really interested in is that kind which
either solves problems or gets something started. Reflection by its very
nature is neither outwardly directed at a problem nor does it seek immediate
effects such as getting some project going. Why, then, should we imagine
that reflection has anything to be said for it?

The answer is that the things of God are only partly involved with solving
problems and launching projects, as much as we might like to think that
the whole of spirituality is involved with these activities! God is our
Eternal Contemporary standing in relationship to us through Christ not
merely when we are solving problems or launching projects, but at every
moment of our lives. God is not closer to us in our moments of activity
than at other times; and the other times are not worthless because they
are not spent in activity!

Reflection is, in fact, the soil in which our loves, hopes, and fears
all grow. If we never took thought, we would never fear anything, love
anyone, or hope for anything. Reflection is how the truth of God first
takes root in us, how it is first to be "owned" by us as its
interpreters, and how it owns us as we interpret it.

Oratio obviously includes praying as requesting but it is by
no means limited to this, for prayer is a many-sided expression of a God-centered
life. Being God-centered in one's life is essential to being God-centered
in one's thoughts. This God centeredness is the sine qua non of
good theology, for, without it, it is impossible to think our thoughts
after God, which is what defines good theology. Prayer and theology, therefore,
require the total orientation of the person-of heart, mind, and will --
to God. Theology without trusting, submissive prayer is no longer good
theology; it is merely an academic exercise which may itself pose as a
substitute for the process of knowing God. Where this happens, the means
has become the end in a kind of perverse idolatry.(8)

Reflection and prayer are matters in which we engage; tentatio is
something which occurs to us and, for that reason, I wish to say little
about it. I merely observe that most of us slip easily into a loose godlessness
-- however well hidden it is beneath religious language and the outward
expressions of piety-unless we are kept in a state of spiritual tension
by life's disconcerting experiences. The adversity which is encompassed
by tentatio is what disciplines the spirit and, difficult as this
may be, it is an essential ingredient in the writing of all profound Christian
thought.

The construction of doctrine, then, is a complex matter in which there
must be a constant and intense interplay between the authoritative Word
through which the interpreter is addressed and the interpreter who hears
this Word. It requires that we learn syntax, verbal forms, and conjugations
and that we sustain a personal relationship to the God of that Word.(9)
The divine address is verbal communication by which and through which God
makes self-disclosures and, in that disclosure and address, elicits our
"wonder, love, and praise." Doctrine, correspondingly, must not
only capture and clarify what it is that has been communicated in Scripture
but it must also bring us face-to-face with the Communicator. It, too,
must elicit from us "wonder, love, and praise."

Aberrations to Be Avoided

There are, I believe, two major aberrations which have gained
popularity amongst evangelicals in the last decade and which, in my judgment,
seriously vitiate the process of constructing doctrine in a way that is
in faithful conformity to Scripture. These are, first, the toying with
Catholic and Anglo-Catholic notions of tradition and, second, the imposition
on Scripture of systems that are alien to it.

The new concern with tradition is in part justifiable. There is no question
that in much fundamentalism and evangelicalism, the Word of God is held
captive to the parochialisms of this age, not to mention the personal eccentricities
of domineering, authoritative preachers. The Word of God is often what
they say it is, and unbelief is defined as disagreeing with their
interpretations! These authoritarian figures often function as an ad
hoc magisterium. How Scripture has been interpreted in the past is
often dismissed as irrelevant. By a strange quirk of logic we have, therefore,
come to repeat the errors we chastised the liberals and Roman Catholics
for committing. On the one hand, by our historical amnesia we break our
continuity with historic Christian faith as did the liberals and, on the
other, we accord to some preachers a magisterial authority in interpreting
Scripture not unlike Roman Catholics do!

The argument that tradition should have a major role in the interpretation
of Scripture, however, usually carries with it a concealed assumption as
to what authority is, where it is located, and how it should operate. The
traditional Roman Catholic position on tradition.(10) involved two distinct
arguments. First, it was argued that the way in which Scripture has been
understood in the church must prescribe for us what Scripture is understood
to declare because it is the Holy Spirit who has provided this interpretation.
It is perfectly clear, though, that the Spirit has never given a uniform
sense on what Scripture teaches, not even in the patristic period. Vincent
of Lerins' Commonitorium in the fifth century sought to address
the fact that there was a welter of opinions within extra-biblical tradition.
This effort was in a measure successful but it is interesting to note that
in the Middle Ages Peter Abelard was nevertheless driven to write his Liber
Sententiarum sic et non citing over one hundred and fifty subjects
on which the early Fathers were in considerable disagreement with one another!
It is this fact which, as in the early church so now, has been a powerful
force in moving people toward the acceptance of the second part of the
argument, namely, that there must be an authoritative church which will
adjudicate finally, absolutely, and even infallibly on which interpretations
should be seen as resulting from the Spirit's illumination and which should
not. The argument for tradition as authoritative teacher becomes, almost
inevitably, an argument for an authoritative church.

The Protestant Reformation is often perceived as having pitted the biblical
Word of God against ecclesiastical tradition. It is true that sometimes
the Reformers complained about the way in which tradition nullified the
teaching of God's Word.(11) The real argument, however, was not so much
with tradition as with a church which used tradition authoritatively. The
Reformers opposed God's authoritative Word to this church which, in their
view, had arrogated to itself an authority which was entirely illicit.
They accepted tradition in the role of guide and counselor; they denied
it could act as authoritative teacher.

In taking this view the Protestant Reformers believed that they were
merely recovering the essence of patristic Christianity which needed to
be affirmed against the later medieval development with which the church
of Rome had become identified. Luther, Calvin, and Cranmer, not to mention
a multitude of their successors, expressed the view that the Christianity
of the first five centuries coincided with their theology and was at odds
with that of Rome.(12)

Their confidence was not ill-founded, especially in their attiude toward
tradition. In the early patrisdc period it was common to draw a distinction
between the apostolic paradosis (tradition) and the church's didaskalia
(teaching). The former, it was asserted by Irenaeus, Tertulhan, and
others, was authoritative and the latter was not. And even didaskalia
was distinguished from theologia.(13) The individual views of
a teacher should not be considered the teaching of the church and the teaching
of the church should not necessarily and automatically be considered the
teaching of Scripture. Thus did Origen, for example, speak of theologia
as the effort of the individual to "make sense" out of Scripture
but he immediately asserted the tentative nature of any such interpretational
In Gregory of Nazianzus the element of indirectness, of being one step
removed from the original data, is identified with the word theologia
and Pseudo-Dionysius employed it as a synonym for mysticisms

Two important changes occurred in this situation, however. First, with
the passage of time the apostolic tradition, which had been the sum and
substance of (the Apostles') teaching on the life, death, and resurrection
of Christ, became broadened to include extra-biblical, oral teaching which
was supposed to have come from the Apostles. This was a deleterious development
because canonical and non-canonical, biblical and non-biblical material
was being indiscriminately blended. Second, as the church was troubled
by heresy and schism from within and by the State from without, uniformity
of belief and practice became a necessity. The means adopted to arrive
at this end was to place great authority in the hands of powerful bishops
and then, in the fourth and fifth centuries, in the hands of a central,
authoritative church in Rome under whose leadership the others were expected
to be subject. These two developments drastically changed the meaning of
tradition. It now became a category broad enough to include extra-biblical
beliefs and practices and then, as it was employed within an authoritative
church, it became the means of achieving uniformity, oftentimes without
reference to Scripture itself It was at that point that the early church
lost the power to reform itself in the fight of God's Word, because at
that point it had dislodged the Word of God from its functional authority
and replaced it by pseudo-ecclesiastical authorities.

The longing for a tradition that will make sense out of our evangelical
tower of Babel, the recoil from self-serving exegesis, and the dissatisfaction
with the miserable and stultifying parochialism of much evangelicalism
are entirely understandable. Our longing for order and security, made all
the more intense by our involvement in a chaotic and changing world, should
not, however, be followed naively down the road of tradition. The siren
voice of authoritative tradition is really a beckoning call into an authoritative
church. And once we arrive there, as the overwhelming majority of contemporary
Catholics has discovered, we find that few problems have actually been
resolved and many more have been created. The truth of the matter is that
there are no infallible interpreters of God's Word in this world, not even
in Rome. It is this fact which creates the space in our inner life to develop
our own trust in God. In the midst of each exigency, we must learn to trust
that the one who gave us this Word will also give us a sufficient understanding
of it, despite all of our sins and prejudices, so that we can live in his
world on his terms as his faithful children.

The second aberration has come in a multitude of forms but common to
them all is a search for a key which will unlock the "real" meaning
of Scripture, a meaning which, it is assumed, is presently obscure or hidden.
This search has commonly taken mystical, rational, and literary forms,
but it is the rational and the literary which are most common in contemporary
evangelicalism.

The search for a rational key, in fact, often results in an imposition
on Scripture of a system not arising naturally from it and is really a
perversion of the truth of Scripture's unity. Examples of it are numerous
but perhaps one of the most widespread and, I dare say, blatant is in some
of the footnoted Bibles that litter the shelves of our bookstores.

If the purpose of these various footnoted Bibles, the most influential
of which is no doubt Scofield's, was merely to provide background information
so that the text might be understood better, then substantial objections
would be hard to make. The truth of the matter, however, is that these
footnotes invariably provide "the system" without which, we are
forced to conclude, Scripture would be forever blurry.

If the Scofield "system" and others like it are plausible,
they are plausible only at the level of hypothesis. As such, the system
itself must always be exposed to the correction of the Word it is seeking
to explain. The problem is, however, that the hypothesis has often become
as fixed and unchangeable as the Bibles to which it is appended. There
are a large number of lay Christians, for example, who, despite the far-reaching
changes which some of Scofield's more learned disciples have worked into
his scheme, still see his original, footnoted "system" as being
as infallible as the Bible which it seeks to explain. The facts and the
hypothesis have become identical. Once the hypothesis found its way into
footnotes at the bottom of each page, the 44 system" became a way
of understanding the Word, which understanding, in practice, is not itself
really subject to correction by that Word as long as those Bibles are in
existence.

It is one of the curious ironies of our time, however, that New Testament
scholars who rail most loudly at the imposition of theological systems
on the text are themselves often proponents of their own type of system.
They merely substitute a literary system for a rational one.

This is nowhere more evident than in the current infatuation with redaction
criticism. It has always been recognized, of course, that the authors of
the Gospels each had a viewpoint in the light of which each made his paraphrastic
selection of material.(16)The argument now, however, is that the
sayings of Jesus had three contexts.(17) The first was the original context
in which the words were uttered; the second was provided by the believing
community which adapted his words to their lives; the third was provided
by the redactor who adapted the saying, as heard from the community, for
his own work which came to represent his "theology." What we
should understand the Gospels to say, therefore, is not to be found primarily
through an exegetical consideration of the text, but rather from a history
which lies behind the text. The meaning of Christian faith is bound up
in discovering what this history was rather than in what the text itself
says.

There are two significant problems created by this approach. First,
it holds the meaning of the text captive to the meaning of a history so
shadowy that it cannot be said with any assurance what it was. The facts,
in this instance, have been inverted. This history is at best only a clue
to what the text says; the text is not supposed to be used as a clue to
this history, for then the text would only be indirectly related to the
meaning of the Christian faith. Second, it holds the meaning of Christian
faith captive to the workings of the scholarly elite. The ecclesiastical
magisterium is now replaced by a scholarly magisterium, for only they have
the knowledge to uncover this history and it is only in this history that
the meaning of faith can be found!(18)

We need to conclude, therefore, that it is dangerous to assert that
God the Holy Spirit inspired the Scriptures but somehow omitted to give
us the key to understand them! Systems of understanding are legitimate
and proper only to the extent that they arise from the biblical Word and
are themselves disciplined by it. No one can legitimately impose a system
on the Word. This applies both to rational systems, such as Scofield's,
and to literary systems, such as those advanced by some advocates of redaction
criticism. The issue the Protestant Reformers faced is quite as much ours
as it was theirs: if we do not assert the right of Scripture to stand in
authoritative relationship to every presupposition, custom, and tradition,
every teaching, practice, and ecclesiastical organization, then that authority
will be coopted either by an ecclesiastical magisterium or by a scholarly
one. Magisterii of this type may imagine that they are invested with some
form of infallibility but time will reveal how mistaken this assumption
is. The Word of God must be freed to form our doctrine for us without the
interference of these pseudo-authorities. It was for this that the Reformers
argued and it is for this that we must argue. It is this contention that
is heralded by sola scriptura, and without the sola scriptura
principle an evangelical theology is no longer evangelical.

Theology and the Pole of Culture

In the model which I have proposed, using electronic media as an example,
it will be seen that theology is related to doctrine as the second step
("encoding") is to the first ("decoding") in the same
process. Theology is that effort by which what has been crystallized into
doctrine becomes anchored in a subsequent age and culture. It is the work
of making doctrine incarnate. God's Word is "enfleshed" in a
society as its significance is stated in terms of that cultural situation.

If doctrine might be represented by an object such as a chair, then
theology would be the use to which that object is put, its effect on its
surroundings and the perspective it gives on its environment. Theology
differs from doctrine as what is unrevealed does from what is revealed,
fallible from what is infallible, derived from what is original, relative
from what is certain, culturally determined from what is divinely given.
Doctrine cannot change from generation to generation, otherwise Christianity
itself would be changing. Theology must change in each succeeding generation,
otherwise it will fail to become a part of the thinking processes and life-style
of that generation. The attempt to change doctrine imperils Christian faith;
the unwillingness to incarnate doctrine in each age by theology imperils
the Christian's credibility. In the one case Christianity can no longer
be believed; in the other, it is no longer believable.

This is, to be sure, a somewhat selective understanding of what is entailed
in doing theology. In addition to the role which has been described briefly,
it has been customary to see theology also functioning within doctrine
in both a protective and a constructive capacity.(19) These tasks are not
in any way denied, although they are not presently being discussed. The
church, it is true, has always had to find ways of protecting its doctrine.
Simple reassertions of biblical language by themselves have often proved
inadequate. The Fathers who sought to ward off Arianism in the early fourth
century discovered this to their chagrin. Arius agreed to all of the biblical
titles and expressions used of Christ's divinity because each one could
be interpreted in such a way as to ascribe to him a diminished divinity
(which, in biblical terms, could not be a divinity at all). The Fathers
at Nicea therefore reluctantly resorted to the use of homoousios which
was not altogether felicitous but at least it was an effective discouragement
to Arianism.

The use of homoousios and all other such protective terms are
provisional and should not be seen to participate in that infauibifity
which attaches to the Word they are protecting. The Nicene Creed and the
Chalcedonian Definition are statements of extraordinary clarity and have
been of immeasurable benefit in the life of the church. However, they are
not divinely revealed and they, too, along with all other confessions,
creeds, and statements of faith, must be subject to the correction of the
biblical Word.

Theologians have likewise always found it beneficial to. develop terms,
concepts, and organizing principles for the work of construction. Proponents
of dispensationalism and of covenant theology, for example, have alike
argued that Scripture itself provides a concept in the light of which its
variety all makes sense. In the one case it is the principle that, in each
of a series of succeeding ages, God has tested his people in terms of their
obedience to a particular form of his revelation; in the other, it is the
proposition that God's salvation is divinely initiated and established,
that it is the same salvation throughout the Bible, and that it is the
notion of covenant which articulates this. The first keys on the differences
between the testaments and the second keys on their unity. These are large
and ambitious forms of construction and there are many lesser examples
of it in and out of evangelicalism. Gustav Aulen's contention, for example,
that the New Testament teaching on Christ's death is teaching simply about
his conquest of the devil -- the "classic motif" falls into this
category as does Karl Barth's understanding of evil conveyed in his term
das Nichtige or Karl Rahner's "supernatural existential."
These constructive devices are in principle legitimate and need to be accorded
legitimacy. But they, too, must be subject to the correction of God's written
Word. Constructive devices of either an organizational or a conceptual
kind cannot be allowed to impose an understanding on Scripture which is
not supported by it and which does not faithfully commend biblical teaching.

It is the relational role of theology which is, however, at the focus
of this essay-the way in which theology relates doctrine to each age in
a vernacular which is native to that age. In this connection I wish to
speak briefly again of the positive principles entailed and then of certain
aberrations which need to be avoided.

Principles of Construction

What, then, is the basis on which this incarnating work should take
place and how should it be done? In the nature of the case, answers to
these questions can only be sketched out in a rudimentary way.

First, with respect to the basis it should be observed that, while it
is true that there is a soteriological discontinuity between God and human
nature, there nevertheless remains a revelational continuity.(20)There is a structure to reality, which is both moral and epistemological
in nature and which, by God's own design and providential operation, is
unaltered by human rebellion. This revelation is natural, in the sense
that it is part and parcel of both the creation and human nature, and it
is general, inasmuch as it is a functional component in all human perception
and cognition. It is the common thread linking vastly different cultural
and social situations. It is what makes Christian discourse possible within
the diversity of languages, social customs, and cultural values prevalent
on the earth. It is prevenient to the gospel and it is the sine qua
non for communicating the nature of the Christian world-view.

With respect to method, it is worth pondering whether or not a legitimate
distinction might be drawn between the content of evangelical theology
and its form or between what Paul Lehman calls its "referential"
and its "phenomenological" aspects. The latter, of course, is
provided by the concrete situation which is being addressed, while the
former is the biblical norm in accordance with which an evangelical theology
shapes itself and before the God of which it stands accountable. In earlier
evangelical theologies content and form were identical; the content of
biblical revelation was crystallized into doctrinal form and this doctrine,
it was assumed, would be self-evident to reasonable people. It may be increasingly
necessary, however, to allow the concrete situation, rather than the biblical
revelation, to propose the "doctrinal" loci or the organizing
forms in terms of which biblical faith needs to speak, because the secularism
of our time has so transformed the way people think that Christian faith
is now in a cross-cultural situation. Such a proposal in no way invalidates
the search for doctrinal forms that are consistent with the substance of
the biblical revelation; it merely means that their discovery will constitute
but a halfway house rather than the journey's destination itself These
doctrinal forms will then have to be adapted to and translated in terms
of the assumptions and norms of the American situation in such a way that
the Word of God is preserved in its integrity but affirmed in its contemporaneity.

The situation that we face today is one in which the moral norms and
cognitive expectations of the culture have also invaded the church. They
form the foundation on which much doctrine is unwittingly built. The doctrine
produces outward Christian activity-an informal code on what is "Christian"
life-style (the agreed points of which are nevertheless being whittled
down with each passing year), Christian activity in and out of church,
and a Christian empire with organs of entertainment, education, and political
influence-but it does not necessarily produce Christians who are, at the
roots of their being, Christian. It does not necessarily produce men and
women who have the capacity or the desire to contest the worldliness of
our time or to flesh out an alternative to it. This doctrine, even in its
most orthodox forms, can become nothing more than a mask which conceals
the real operating principles in a person's life which may be worldly and
secular. It is, then, the task of theology to expose these principles in
the interest of securing a real adherence to the doctrine which is being
given outward assent.(21) An orthodox veneer is, I suspect, something that
happens to us almost unknowingly since we often do not understand how our
culture has shaped us in the very depths of our being. This is especially
the case in the way that technology operates in our culture.

Emil Brunner has asserted that we in the West are living in a unique
moment.(22) Never before has a major civilization attempted to build deliberately
and self-consciously without religious foundations. Beneath other civilizations
there were always religious assumptions-whether these came from Islam,
Buddhism, Hinduism, or Christianity-and it was these assumptions which
gave both legitimacy and stability to the social order. Beneath ours there
are none. In their absence we have technology. Technology is the metaphysic
of twentieth-century America.

This, of course, is the theme that has been developed at some length
by Jacques Ellul.(23) Technology, he argues, is a metaphysic because it
prescribes a world-view, it has its own ethic-what is right is what is
efficient -- andit is its own justification. That being
the case, it controls by right those who five in a society organized to
cater for its needs educationally, industrially, and politically. It forms
them into people of narrow vision and diminished humanity. They become
small functionaries in a larger scheme of things, technicians who view
all of life in a mechanical fashion. Life poses problems. Problems demand
solutions. The solutions adopted are those that work, with little
regard being given for what the long-range consequences might be, whether
the means being chosen are best suited to the ends being sought or whether
they are intrinsically moral or not. This mentality has become ubiquitous
in our society.

Peter Berger has gone on to argue that it produces its own way of knowing.(24)
It requires a quantifying habit of mind, the kind which reduces all knowledge
to mathematical formulae and statistics. This is perfectly appropriate
when divorce rates or demographic changes are being plotted, but it is
peculiarly inappropriate when matters of intimacy are under discussion,
such as the praxis of the bedroom or matters of complexity such as human
motivation and the makeup of religious conviction.

The truth is, however, that once we allow ourselves to become technicians
in our society we are thereafter required always to act and think like
technicians in all circumstances.

The technological society in turn destroyed "natural groupings."
A "natural grouping" is a small social unit made up of people
whose fives are in some measure interlaced and who provide for each other
a stable context in which the orderly transmission of values can take place
from parents to children. The most important of these is the conjugal family,
but in ethnic environments the extended family and the neighborhood are
also included. There is a wholeness to the group, a sharing of lives at
many different points.

These social groupings are being destroyed. Industrial development has
brought workers into the great urban organizing centers and in the process
has driven a wedge between a person's work life and his or her home life.
It has produced extraordinary mobility which in turn has destroyed most
functioning neighborhoods because their residents are so transient. It
has reduced the family, in many cases, to being a passing convenience for
its members. Its function is simply to meet the most minimal needs of shelter
and procreation.

In place of the former importance of these natural groupings there has
emerged a greater stress both upon the individual and upon the mass collective.
The individual, increasingly emancipated psychologically from the binding
family context and social matrix of a neighborhood, imagines that he or
she is floating somewhat indeterminately in society, blessed by a "freedom"
unparalleled in previous ages. This, counters Ellul, is an illusion. The
place of personal responsibility within and accountability to a natural
grouping is filled by the demands of the mass collective. Its process-the
life of technology-is operating merely on the flat plane of what works
and it asserts its total authority over the individual; it asks for its
price.

That price is not only a loss of real freedom and responsibility but
also the willingness to define what is of value in life in terms of what
technology can deliver. In this connection, Daniel Yankelovich has argued,
for example, that an astonishing number of Americans have accepted Abraham
Maslow's distinction between "lower order" and "higher order"
needs. Lower order needs, however, are not seen as being met merely by
sufficient food and adequate shelter. They will only be met when affluence
liberates us more or less completely from concerns of this type in order
that we might experience more leisure and give ourselves more fully to
discretionary and recreational pursuits. Thus has a view of human development
been married to a psychology of affluence.(25)

It is in this framework, it is with these presuppositions, with these
mental habits, and with these functional values and spiritual expectations
that evangelical theology must wrestle. It is not enough to argue that
people, according to biblical teaching, are made up of a mortable body
and an immortable soul. The spiritual dimension to life has also to be
seen as it is being shaped within contemporary culture.

It may be asserted, for example, that rationality is a part of the image
of God. Rationality, however, is but a capacity. It is a capacity whose
specific form and operations are, in some measure, a reflection of the
socio-psychological environment in which it functions. The capacity is
God-given but the content is culturally informed and shaped. The presence
of this capacity provides Christian theology with its entree, but
the particular cultural orientation which it has demands of the theologian
that his or her proclamation be angled in such a way as to take account
of these presuppositions.

Christian theology declares, then, that in Christ we are called to receive
not only God's forgiveness but also the healing of our own mind as well
as that of our humanity. This is nevertheless a meaningless affirmation
if it is not cognizant of the fact that family life is under assault, that
as a result many people feel alienated from their families and have never
found viable substitutes, that their experience within our technological
society has left them feeling a profound sense of dissatisfaction with
themselves from which they urgently seek escape through drugs, sex, or
recreation. They are people who feel as if they have been cut loose on
a sea of relativity where absolute norms and enduring values have disappeared
forever. It is people like these who need to rediscover their humanity
through Christ; the human beings who are defined and described in our theological
abstractions exist only as idealized, abstract specimens of humanity.

Contextualization, then, is but another name for describing the servant
role of theology. The Son of God assumed the form of a servant to seek
and save the lost and theology must do likewise, incarnating itself in
the cultural forms of its time without ever losing its identity as Christian
theology. God, after an, did not assume the guise of a remote Rabbi who
simply declared the principles of eternal truth, but in the Son he compassionately
entered into the life of ordinary people and declared to them what God's
Word meant to them. But in so doing, the Son never lost his identity as
divine. Christian thought is called to do likewise, to retain its identity
(doctrine) within its role as servant (theology) within a particular culture.

Aberrations to Be Avoided

The contextualization of which this essay speaks is quite different
from that in vogue in WCC circles and occasionally on the fringes of evangelical
thought. "Contextualization" is here used of the process whereby
biblical doctrine is asserted within the context of modernity. It recognizes
that there is a twofold relevance to be presented, to the text as well
as to the context, but it insists that the relevance to the modem context
will collapse as soon as the relevance to the biblical text is lost. It
is this insistence which is often lost in WCC discussions on contextualization.
These discussions assume a disjuncture between doctrine and theology. The
meaning of faith is cut loose from many biblical controls. Its substance
becomes an amalgam derived as much from political ideologies (with which
God is said to be identified) as from the Scriptures (with which God is
thought to be loosely associated). In the one understanding of contextualization,
the revelatory trajectory moves only from authoritative Word into contemporary
culture; in the other, the trajectory moves both from text to context and
from context to text, and in the midst of this traffic the interpreter,
rather like a police officer at a busy intersection, emerges as the sovereign
arbiter as to what God's Word for our time actually is.

This development is actually part of a much more complex movement whose
roots reach back into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The evolution
of this movement has been analyzed well by Hans Frei.(26) What he shows
is how under idealist, romanticist, or rationalistic impulses the meaning
of the biblical narrative was no longer seen to be identical with the meaning
of the text of the biblical narrative. The words, sentences, and configurations
of the narrative were seen merely to exhibit a consciousness whose continuity
with the modem consciousness was assumed but whose actual expression differed
vastly from the modern expression of it. The continuity of Christian faith
was therefore seen to he in the continuity of this consciousness rather
than in preservation and affirmation of the same doctrinal content.(27)

This was, of course, the central proposition in both European and American
liberalism and it has been affirmed in much recent Protestantism, even
by those who, in other respects, are opposed to liberalism. A case in point
is Rudolf Bultmann. It is, of course, his contention that the early Christians
employed "myth" to formulate their experience of the post-resurrection
Christ. The way they explained their experience was to employ the cosmology
at hand which, in the first century, was one in which reality was seen
to be natural and supernatural, in which there was a heaven and a hell,
and in which miracles could occur. They had no option but to employ these
conceptions. No person, Bultmann argues, can simply choose his or her worldview.
World-views are given to us, prescribed for us by the circumstances, culture,
and times in which we live.(28) New Testament Christians, therefore, were
obliged to see Christ as a world-transcending, cosmic being replete
with pre-existence, miraculous powers, and divine status. We who live in
the twentieth century with its radical desacralization, its staggering
redefinition of reality wrought by science and technology, cannot believe
in the same figure or the same cosmology. What is important is not how
this mysterious Galilean might have thought of himself or how the early
church conceived of him but how his openness to the divine can be replicated
in our own experience.

South American and Asian liberation theology has been fiercely critical
of most existential theology, Bultmann's included. What seems most offensive
about it is that faith is made identical with insight. Existential theologies
are intensely private and inward Liberation theologians have charged that
God becomes the alibi for not engaging with the world. And engagement with
the world is precisely what liberation theologies are about.

It is ironical to note, however, that these theologies which have made
an anti-Western attitude their watchword continue to echo the approach
of much modern, Western theology!(29) What Protestant liberalism, Bultmannianism
and liberation theology all have in common is the supposition that the
modem context determines how we should or how we can read the biblical
narrative. They all assume although Bultmann is unusually and refreshingly
candid in this respect-that the interpreter's cognitive horizon limits
or determines the cognitive horizon of the text.

What this means in practice is that the Bible is unable to deliver to
us its cargo because the twentieth century has made us incapable of receiving
it. As a description, this may be correct; as a theological prescription,
it is disastrous. The interpreter is now no longer subject to the Word
being interpreted but, in his or her own name and in the name of enlightened
twentieth century consciousness, he or she redefines its content! This
inverts the proper relationship between text and interpreter, committing
the same kind of blunder as did the schoolboy who was startled out of an
illicit slumber by his teacher's question and blurted out that science
had indubitably proved all monkeys are descended from Darwin! It leads
us in some cases to think that given our understanding of reality-and the
assumption isthat this understanding is well in advance of any
that has pertained in previous ages. Scripture must be demythologized since
it is dear that Scripture cannot be believed at face value in the twentieth
century. It leads us in other cases into equating the substance of faith
with a variety of ideological and political positions with which we (and
it is assumed God) are aligned. To act in faith is to act politically.

The truth of the matter is that it is not Scripture which needs to be
demythologized but the twentieth century! To take twentieth-century experience
(in the case of the existential theologians) or political reality (in the
case of liberation theologies) as an absolute in the light of which the
meaning of faith must be redefined is to capitulate to the Zeitgeist
at the very points where the Zeitgeist often needs most to be
challenged. Accommodation of this kind is worldliness.

It is indisputable that the modem context affects the interpreter of
Scripture psychologically and epistemologically. The context in practice
often limits or distorts what Scripture is heard to say. Bultmann believes
this is inevitable; that must be challenged. Liberation theologies see
this context -- especially in its political makeup -- as providing the
foundation on which the truth of the biblical Word can build, but all too
often in practice this means that the political context yields the agenda
for theology and that prevailing political ideologies determine how that
agenda will be followed. And that, too, must be challenged!

The issue today, it needs to be said in conclusion, is no different
in principle from what it was in the sixteenth century. The Protestant
Reformers insisted that the Word of God must be free to speak unhampered
by tradition or by the limitations of experience. In the case of the Roman
Church, tradition had come to exercise a restraining role on biblical revelation;
it was, Luther asserted, gagging Scripture. By the same token, some Anabaptists
allowed Scripture (the externum Verbum) to be authoritative in practice
only insofar as its teaching was authenticated by inner experience (the
internum Verbum). The Reformers countered that both the church and
our experience must alike be subject to Scripture, for it is through our
willingness to hear the Word of God that we exercise our accountability
before the God of the Word.

In a fallen world, authorities in competition with God and his Christ
and his Word are precisely what one would expect to find. What one would
not expect to find is these pseudo authorities being given aid and comfort
within the structures of evangelical theology, but that is precisely what
we have today. It underscores the contention of the Reformers, however,
that reformation should not be seen merely as a past event but should always
be a contemporary experience. In every generation the Word of God must
be heard afresh and obeyed afresh if the God of that Word is to be accorded
our obedience at the places where it really counts.

NOTES

1. On the question of biblical authority in Reformation theology
much has been written but especial note should be taken on A. Skevington
Wood, Captive to the Word: Martin Luther, Doctor of Sacred Scripture
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1969);Kenneth Kantzer, "Calvin
and the Holy Scripture," in Inspiration and Interpretation, ed.
John F. Walvoord (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, I957), PP. 115-155;Roger
Nicole, "John Calvin and Inerrancy," Journal of the Evangelical
Theological Society 25, No. 4 (December 1982),425-442;
and Philip E. Hughes, Theology of the English Reformers (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 1965), PP. 9-44.

3. The original idea was borrowed from Claude E. Shannon and Warren
Weaver's The Mathematical Theory of Communication (Urbana, IL: Univ
rsity of Illinois, 1949) and used in David -Hesselgrave's Communicating
Christ Cross-Culturally (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, I978), pp. 28-37.
From its context in missions, it was appropriated for theology.

4. This distinction was first suggested but not at all developed in
my Searchfor Salvation (Downers Grove: InterVarsity press, 1978),
PP. 39-40.

7. On the significance of oratio, meditatio, and tentatio, Iam indebted to comments made by Paul Holmer at Yale, the essence of
which were developed later into his study The Grammar olf Faith (New
York: Harper and Row, 1978).

9. It was, of course, the contention of the neo-orthodox theologians
in particular that if revelation is personal-and they insisted it was-then
it could not be propositional. The price which they paid to secure its
personal aspect (which was the denial of its propositional nature) was
both unnecessary and unwise. This particular issue is reviewed helpfully
in the essays by Gordon H. Clark, "Special Revelation as Rational";
Paul K. Jewett, "Special Revelation as Historical and Personal";
and William J. Martin, "Special Revelation as Objective"; in
Revelation and the Bible, ed. Carl F. H. Henry (Grand Rapids: Baker
Book House, I958), PP. 25-72. It is powerfully developed, negatively and
positively, throughout the first three volumes of Carl F. H. Henry's God,
Revelation and Authority (Waco: Word, 1976-1979).

10. The essential elements in the traditional understanding of tradition
were left intact by the Second Vatican Council but it was made a more fluid
reality to be defined as much by the people of God as by the magisterium.
See G. C, Berkouwer, The Second Vatican Council and the New Catholicism,
trans. Lewis B. Smedes (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1965), pp. 89-111;
and David F. Wells, "Tradition: A Meeting Place for Catholic and Evangelical
Theology?" Christian Scholar's Review, 5, No. I (1975), 50-61.

16. This position was advanced even in the "pre-critical"
period by Calvin. This general approach is well represented by Ned Stonehouse's
The Witness of Luke to Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1951)and The Witness ofmatthew and Mark to Christ (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 1958).

17. This argument and the reasons for it are clearly explained
by Norman Perrin, Nat Is Redartion Criticism? (Philadelphia: Fortress
Press, 1969).

18. See further the fine essay by D. A. Carson, "Redaction
Criticism: On the Legitimacy and Illegitimacy of a Literary Tool,"
in Scripture and Truth, ed. D. A. Carson and John D. Woodbridge
(Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1983), PP. 119-146.

20. The most illuminating discussion of the issues at stake is
probably to be found in the exchanges between Emil Brunner and Karl Barth.
Brunner's position, in my judgment, has much to be said for it at this
point. See Emil Brunner, Natural Theology: Comprising "Nature and
Grace" by Emil Brunner and the Reply "No!' by Karl Barth, trans.
Peter Fraenkel (London: G. Bles, 1946). On the question in general see
G. C. Berkouwer, General Revelation. Studies in Dogmatics (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1955).

26. Hans W Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study
in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1974). Some of the same points are echoed, albeit more
stringently, in Gerhard Maier, The End of the Historical-Critical Method,
trans. Edwin W Leverenz and Rudolph F. Norden (St. Louis: Concordia.Pubhshing
House, 1977).

27. The present employment of Scripture in theological discourse
is analyzed by David Kelsey, The Uses of Scripture in Recent Theology
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975).